Pattern of the Day? Ha. It’s been more like Pattern of the Month. That’s because I have been working hard on a couple of big projects that I’m not able to post yet. So I’ve been creating close to a pattern a day, but I can’t show them to you… (if a tree falls in the woods but no one hears it, did it make a sound?).

I will resume posting once I get past these deadlines, and depending on what happens with the patterns I’ve been working on, I may be posting 30-odd patterns at one time. I just put a little “subscribe” icon in the sidebar so that it would be easy for you to sign up for email updates (when I finally post some patterns again, you’ll get an email) or an RSS feed for those of you who know what that is.

More strange fruits, this time cut in half. I’m enjoying using more color for the summer….my natural bent is to do everything in olive, brown and mustard, but the season (and the subject matter) are helping me expand into some new palettes.

More fruit patterns….today, the lovely pomegranate. It’s such a gorgeous fruit that I want my depiction to do it justice. So I will begin with some pomegranate studies, in which each fruit sketch is treated slightly differently:

Now I’m going to try an asymmetrical version using one of my favorites from the studies:

Today’s pattern pics come straight from north Denver, where my son Gus is performing in a play at the Bug Theater.

The Bug is a cute old theater, built in 1912 as a nickelodeon movie house. According to the website:

The theatre now known as The Bug survived multiple incarnations and more than 25 years of dormancy before local artists Chandler Romeo and Reed Weimer renovated the building in 1994 and founded the Bug Performance & Media Art Center (BPMAC), a non-profit organization dedicated to serving Denver audiences by facilitating the development and presentation of diverse arts and cultural programming.

You can see how the various incarnations impacted the building in some strange ways. Here’s an old pic (again, from their website, thanks Bug) that shows what it looked like originally.

When you get up close to the building, you can see that the original tile extends out beyond the wall (apparently built in the 50s), and that the wall was built at an angle.

Look at this great tile. It’s exactly the same as the tile border as in the Grow store. We always speculated that the Grow store used to be a barbershop or apothecary, but apparently that same style of tile was used in theaters also. I’d never seen these tiny circular tiles before.

Here’s an up-close of the 50s wall. I love this style of wall…but why did they put it at an angle? Was the architect trying to “modernize” the building when they enclosed the lobby? And look at the interesting pattern in the piece of steel between the sections of the building.

This large metal floor panel could have been just flat, but instead it has two unusual patterns pressed into both sides.

At night, the right-hand panel glows with light, because some of those circles are filled with a thick glass. You can see where they’re broken out in the photo above. Underneath the doors is what looks like a spider-webby stairway that presumably goes under the theater, and a little clamp lamp that someone put under there, to make the panel glow.

Next door to the bug is an environmental consulting firm and a little gallery where my friends Sarah and Kelton met years ago. The consulting firm has nice decorative steel window bars, a little bullet hole, and a lovely manhole cover in the front sidewalk.

And, for the last north Denver pattern, a close-up of the building across the street, which was also apparently “modernized” in the 50s with the addition of a stone facade.

We have a book at home called “How Buildings Learn” by Stewart Brand (of Whole Earth Catalog fame, and now founder of an interesting organization called The Long Now Foundation which was founded “…to provide counterpoint to today’s “faster/cheaper” mind set and promote “slower/better” thinking, [in order to] creatively foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years…”).

Anyway, the How Buildings Learn book discusses these kinds of issues. Brand essentially argues that buildings are almost like Darwinian mechanisms, in that they have to change and “grow” to adapt to human needs and environmental and economic conditions.

Final Obama pattern (I think). You may have noticed that I’ve used this same pattern for three days now, which technically goes against my rules, but I’ve spent so much time on it that I am justifying the rule-bending. And really, since it’s actually a big pattern made up of many, many small patterns, I’m feeling pretty good about my digression.

Henry preferred the b/w version, so I’m back to that one. I like the color version too, but agree that this makes a stronger image.

Here’s a revision of the Obama pattern. I rushed through it yesterday in order to get it posted, but it really needed to be done more carefully. I’m not sure if tonight’s pattern is final or not, but it’s an improvement over yesterday. Note the removal of the nuclear energy icon, as per Ted’s insistence. I will use that icon in a new, non-political pattern because I like it so much.

Here’s the pattern for tonight: Obama #1. It’s inspired by Stig Lindberg, an incredible Swedish designer. Here are a few examples of his patterns. You’ll see which one provided the concept for this one.

One more using that same teardrop shape…I keep thinking I’ll be able to do something with it that I really like, but so far they’re just so-so. I’ve been working on a pattern that I will hopefully post tomorrow. It’s much more elaborate and thematic than most of my other patterns. I’m hoping it will turn out looking similar to how I’m imagining it. Wow…that was a lot of gerunds in that last sentence.

Anyway, here is a little drawing of cartoon raindrops. I think it would be fun to animate this and use it in the background of a narrative cartoon. Henry is learning Flash, so maybe he will be able to help me animate it.